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Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our 
Religious Tradition.  Alfred A.  Knopf.  New York/Toronto, 2006. pp. 
469.  $30.00 hc.  ISBN 0-375-41317-0.  

Thomas Cattoi, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley

Readers of George Eliot’s Middlemarch might recall how Dorothea’s 
first husband, the Rev. Casaubon, devotes his entire life to a search for 
a comprehensive explanation of all beliefs of humankind. His magnum 
opus, a treatise called The Key to All Mythologies, is meant to show that 
all extant religions and philosophies are mere fragments of a coherent 
body of knowledge, a lost wisdom which ordinary mortals grasp only in 
speculo et enigmate. Dorothea is initially awed by her husband’s erudi-
tion, but eventually discovers, after Casaubon’s demise, that the project 
had collapsed. All she is left with are fragments, which no amount of 
intellectual effort can marshal into a coherent whole.  

George Eliot’s indirect critique of all-encompassing belief systems 
reflected her personal disillusion with the claims of Christian theol-
ogy and ethics, and indeed, Casaubon’s failure might also be read as a 
warning to those intellectuals who in Eliot’s time were becoming too 
easily enamored of the sweeping generalizations of continental (mainly 
Hegelian) philosophy. A century later, Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition 
voices concerns that are not too dissimilar from those of the Victorian 
novelist: at the deathbed of modernity, we inherit the ruins of earlier 
meta-narratives, relics of a shattered hybris which offer no guidance or 
consolation.  

Beginning with the publication of her History of God, Karen Arm-
strong has gained an unparalleled position as an independent scholar 
of religion. Armstrong’s undisputed erudition has not prevented her 
works from topping numerous bestseller lists, and in the wake of Sep-
tember 11 her intellectual impartiality has lent even greater weight to 
her calls for mutual understanding and tolerance. Reading the second 
installment of her autobiography, The Spiral Staircase, it is clear that 
Armstrong herself is the first to be surprised by such extraordinary 
success, which followed many years marked by illness and depression.  



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Her negative experiences as a member of a religious order and later as 
an aspiring academic have left her with a deep mistrust of religious 
and intellectual authoritarianism, which comes through in her self-def-
inition as a “free-lance monotheist.” Reading Armstrong’s latest work, 
which carries the title The Great Transformation, one starts wonder-
ing, however, whether her penchant for synthesis and her search for an 
impartial point of view have not made her vulnerable to Casaubon’s 
temptation.  Is Armstrong’s “great transformation” the “key to all my-
thologies” for a postmodern world? 

In her introduction, Armstrong resorts to Jaspers’ notion of an “Axial 
Age” to denote the period between 900 BCE and 200 BCE, when “the 
great world traditions that have continued to nourish humanity” (xii) 
came into being. On the same page, Armstrong calls the Axial Age “one 
of the most seminal periods of intellectual, psychological, philosophi-
cal and religious change in recorded history,” noting that it was “the 
period of the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, and Jeremiah, the mystics 
of the Upanishads, Mencius, and Euripides.” Indeed, even “Rabbinic 
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” are categorized as “latter day flower-
ings of the Axial Age,” even if their beginning came centuries after the 
creative heyday that has given us the Pali canon, the Greek tragedies, 
or the Tao. Later on, we are told how “the consensus of the Axial Age 
is an eloquent testimony to the unanimity of the spiritual quest of 
the human race” (xiv), although we are reminded that “the Axial Age 
was not perfect,” mainly because of its “indifference to women” (xvi).  
Wherever a particular tradition stops emphasizing the importance of 
ethical norms and begins stressing the acceptance of obligatory doc-
trines, Armstrong views the shift as a sign that “the Axial Age [has] lost 
its momentum” (xiii).  

Armstrong envisages the gradual discovery of interiority and the 
move away from tribalism and ritualism as the “great transformation” 
marking the Axial Age, though she is ready to admit that “the Axial 
peoples did not evolve in a uniform way” (xvii). Indeed, we are told 
that certain traditions “achieved an insight that was truly worthy of the 
Axial Age,” but eventually “retreated from it.” The people of India are 
said to have always been “on the vanguard of Axial progress”; in Israel, 



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the Axial ideal was achieved “by fits and starts”; in China, we see the 
traces of “incremental progress”; and the Greeks, from the very begin-
ning, “went in an entirely different direction” from the other peoples.  
Virtually everything can be made to fit into the purview of the “Axial 
vision”; and indeed, when a definition is too broad, its usefulness soon-
er or later comes into question. Armstrong’s goal is to underscore the 
enduring relevance of many of the teachings that the great traditions 
have handed down to us; at the same time, to retrieve their authentic 
import, we must “bring the best insights of modernity to the table.”  
We are told that the outcome of our efforts will be a “recreation” of 
the “Axial vision,” but we are left in the dark as to what the latter will 
entail. One could actually argue that every major religious figure over 
the past twenty-five centuries tried to do exactly that, retrieving themes 
from his or her tradition to apply them to the issues of the day. Who 
are we to claim that “our” recreation will be more faithful to the “Axial 
spirit” than the previous re-appropriations and re-elaborations?

The readers of this work are invited to join Armstrong on a long 
intellectual cruise that takes them from the steppes of Northern India 
to the desert of Judea, and from the princely courts of ancient China 
to the acropolis in Athens. The text goes back and forth from one of 
the four “Axial peoples” to the next, seeking to underscore the points 
of contact between their religious experience and the ensuing theo-
logical speculation. The result, however, is only moderately satisfying.  
Admittedly, Armstrong wears her learning lightly; even those readers 
already familiar with the evolution of the Greek and the Hebrew mind 
will find much food for thought in her discussion of the Indian and 
especially the Chinese traditions, which probes behind the customary 
vague labels of “Hinduism,” “Buddhism,” or “Confucianism.” Some 
will argue that Armstrong’s readers enjoy a notable advantage over Ca-
saubon’s long-suffering wife: the fragments of the puzzle are already 
pieced together for them. The question, however, is whether the re-
sulting coherent narrative is an adequate portrayal of reality, or in-
stead—and this appears increasingly likely as we read on—Armstrong’s 
Axial Age is a sort of a theological Procrustean bed, where the limbs of 
different traditions are broken by willful overstretching.  



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The first chapter explores the nature of religious practice before the 
onset of the “Axial Age”; this is then followed by eight chapters, which 
chart in a chronological fashion the parallel development of the four 
different traditions. The second section, for instance, is devoted to “rit-
ual,” and charts the development of the four Axial people in the ninth 
century BCE, highlighting the extent to which later periods responded 
to this early emphasis on violent sacrifices. Armstrong explains the de-
velopment of Greek myth and ritual sacrifices as a reaction to the vio-
lent collapse of Minoan or Mycenaean society, which might account 
for the widespread cult of “chthonian powers” (56) during the ensuing 
“dark age” (58); she contends however that during this early period 
of Greek civilization “there was no introspection” and “no attempt to 
analyze the hidden drama” that “haunted the Greek psyche” (61).  The 
centrality of ritual in the development of the Hebrews’ religious con-
sciousness is similarly underscored, and Armstrong presents the emer-
gence of monotheism as the long-term consequence of the decision to 
worship one deity alone (69), thereby marking a rupture with earlier 
polytheistic practices. In India, the reform of Vedic ceremonial is as-
sociated with the discovery of interiority, as well as the gradual erasure 
of “agonistic practices” and violence from the religious arena (68–69).  
In China, ritual is closely associated with the running of the state; the 
correct performance of traditional rites by the legitimate monarch is 
seen as the guarantee of the smooth functioning of the natural order, 
as well as the long-term stability of the state.  

The title of each section of the book indicates a common theme 
which supposedly characterizes every segment of the book; and indeed 
it often appears that the “Casaubon search” for a “theory of everything” 
affects not only the whole work, but also its individual sections. The 
third section, for instance, is titled “kenosis,” and sets out to explore 
how, in the eighth century BCE, “some were beginning to be critical 
of ritual and wanted a more ethically based religion.” The term used 
in Philippians 2.7 to describe Christ’s self-emptying is deployed here 
to indicate the growing emphasis on interiority and ethics that char-
acterized the “Axial peoples” at this time. One may wonder whether 
such use of the term is legitimate, since Armstrong detaches “kenosis” 



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entirely from its Christological context; in a later section, for instance, 
she is ready to tell us that Oedipus had to undergo “kenosis” in or-
der to attain “true knowledge” (257).  Here, the Hebrews undergo 
“kenosis” as the prophets urge them to examine their inner lives and 
abandon egotism (90), though “patriotic pride and chauvinistic theol-
ogy” suppresses the prophetic call for conversion and leads the nation 
to self-destruction. Similarly, the decision of Indian renouncers (sam-
nyasins) to forego the comforts of structured family life is implicitly 
construed as “kenotic.” But how is “kenosis” supposed to describe the 
Chinese situation of the time, where the constant infighting between 
different states resulted in a greater, rather than a lesser, focus on ritual? 
Similarly, while Armstrong finds an instance of “self-emptying sympa-
thy” in Achilles’ dialogue with Priam (110–11), she has to admit that 
“the Greeks felt no need to develop new forms of religion but remained 
satisfied by the ancient cult.” The difference between the “Greek path” 
and that of the remaining “Axial peoples” is emphasized so often that 
one starts wondering whether their inclusion in this group is entirely 
justified.  

Often, the way definite time periods are identified with a specific 
theme appears rather arbitrary. Armstrong views the seventh century 
BCE as a time characterized by a search for “knowledge,” though this 
was certainly not absent in the previous periods. The spirituality of the 
Upanishads, however, could have also been characterized as “kenotic”; 
and no rupture appears evident between the earlier Chinese tradition 
and the intricate family ceremonials emerging in China at the time.  
At the same time, the move to put religious law in writing and the 
ensuing composition of what would become the Five Books of Moses 
appears moved by different motives than the shift from mythos to logos 
which Armstrong reads behind the military reorganization of Greek 
city states. Are Josiah’s cultic reform and Sparta’s political ascendancy 
really indicative of a common shift in religious sensitivity?  

Similar objections could be raised against every section of the book.  
In the sixth century BCE, the chosen common denominator is “suffer-
ing.” The exiled people of Israel begin to question the “neat, rationalis-
tic God of the Deuteronomists” (172), and this “trauma of dislocation” 



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results in a new form of prophecy typified by Ezekiel. In Greece, this 
“suffering” is ascribed to the social crisis that gradually enveloped the 
different city states; as a result, some Greeks felt it necessary “to follow 
the promptings of logos to the bitter end” (189), and to develop an “en-
tirely new rationalism” (188–89), which certainly would not have been 
out of place in the chapter on “knowledge.” Indeed, it is to fight “igno-
rance” (193) that new meditation techniques are developed in India at 
the same time as Ezekiel has his vision of the Holy of Holies. One also 
wonders in what way “empathy” can be distinguished from “concern 
for everybody.” Armstrong’s reflections on Greek tragedy (226–32) are 
poignant and insightful, but one wonders whether Sophocles and Ae-
schylus were truly responding to the same “spiritual vacuum” (232) 
behind the Indian schools of Gosala and Mahavira.  

In Israel, we are told, the Axial Age came to a close at an earlier stage 
than among the other Axial peoples, but Armstrong insists that “Rab-
binic Judaism, Christianity and Islam” (248) are effectively a “second 
flowering” of the Axial “concern for everybody.” In Greece, it was left 
to Socrates to enlighten the youth as to the nature of goodness. Chap-
ter seven goes on to discuss the emergence of Buddhism, rehearsing 
themes and arguments which were also developed in Armstrong’s ear-
lier biography of the Buddha. This is one of the most interesting sec-
tions of the work, and it is quite enlightening to read about Gautama’s 
experience in the context of similar quests in India and China.  

The discussion of Plato and Aristotle in the following section, how-
ever, is more problematic. Armstrong tells us that at the beginning 
of his career, Plato’s actions had been characterized by tolerance and 
an unflinching devotion to the truth, whereas later, his vision “had 
soured” and had become “coercive, intolerant, and punitive,” making 
his religion “wholly intellectual” (325). This is at best an overstatement 
and at worst a distortion of Plato’s views, and Armstrong fails to sup-
port it with adequate textual evidence. We are then told that the Axial 
Age in Greece would make “marvelous contributions to mathemat-
ics, dialectics, medicine and science,” but it was already “moving away 
from spirituality.” Hellenistic philosophy, or Neo-Platonic mysticism, 
are apparently beyond the pale. But this section abounds with surprises.  



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We are told that Aristotle saw God as the Unmoved Mover (328)—a 
statement which needs a far more careful contextualization than the 
one Armstrong gives. Her sympathies are, however, often unfathom-
able. On one hand we are told that Aristotle had “a better understand-
ing of traditional spirituality than Plato” (329) and was “more com-
fortable with emotions” than his master. A few lines below, however, 
Armstrong laments that “unfortunately,” Aristotle “made an indelible 
impression on Western Christianity” (330). Value-judgments of this 
sort abound throughout the work, and of course readers are expected 
to concur, though counterarguments are never considered.

By the time we reach the last section, we are so inured to generaliza-
tions as to be no longer surprised by such statements as, “The spiritual 
revolution of the Axial Age had occurred against a backcloth of turmoil, 
migration, and conquest” (366). Given that the age in question lasted 
for seven hundred years, one wonders which historical period of the 
same length could not be characterized by an identical statement. We 
are also introduced to Rabbinic Judaism (which also includes Christi-
anity), as well as Islam, whose founder, the prophet Muhammad, “had 
never heard of the Axial Age,” though “he would have probably under-
stood the concept” (385). Indeed, it is rather doubtful that Lao Tzu, 
Socrates, or any of the other thinkers reviewed in this book were closely 
acquainted with Karl Jaspers either. Armstrong’s marathon closes with 
an appeal to mutual understanding and tolerance “in a tragic world, 
where, as the Greeks knew, there can be no simple answers” (399).  

At the end of this work, I found myself wondering, What is the 
intended audience of this book? Scholars of religion are unlikely to 
turn to Armstrong to deepen their understanding of history and theol-
ogy, and her penchant for emphasizing what often are rather tenuous 
points of contact between different traditions will alienate the more 
academically-minded. On the other hand, readers with little previous 
exposure to the history of religion might find themselves utterly lost 
in this labyrinth of names and teachings, and, as we saw, the Ariadne’s 
woof of “Axial Age spirituality” is all too easily cut. Armstrong’s project 
suffers from its excessive scope. She seemed to fare much better in her 
earlier History of God: her grasp of the material was stronger, and the 



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overarching methodological template did not force her into intellectu-
al sleights of hand. This is not to say that there is not much of value in 
this work, but perhaps, as George Eliot seemed to say over a hundred 
years ago, all we can truly know are fragments. Anything beyond that 
is hybris.


	Kathryn Hughes. The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton.
	Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Tradition
	Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Islamic Philosophy From its Origin to the Present.

